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Friday, October 17, 2014

"Overcoming Our Biological Limits"

It is a techno-transcendental commonplace to pretend that medicine is confounding long definitive biological limitations in human health, capacity, lifespan, and so on. These claims are usually just completely false, but they are always overblown. The Pill provides a fine illustration of the point, since it truly did enable a fundamental and profoundly emancipatory transformation of the human condition in my view, but without rendering humanity "post-human" in the sense that interests the superlative futurologists in the least.

I see no reason to expect any radical enhancement of definitive human capacities or any increase of lifespan beyond the upper bound some lucky humans have always enjoyed in recorded history (although I would like to think medical improvements might enable many more humans to share in that bit of luck) of the sort that would render "posthuman" or "transhuman" terms more apt now than they have been since World War II to characterize human beings. But quite apart from this sort of well warranted skepticism about imminent techno-transcendental expectations -- whether originating in ill-informed credulity, promotional fraud, pseudo-science, or wish-fulfillment fantasizing -- I must say that I find techno-transcendental interpretations of such projected outcomes profoundly wrongheaded in principle even if they were not also wildly implausible or premature.

On the one hand, these futurologists seem too eager to treat biological limits as self-evident givens, when the terms of bodily legibility and the significance with which biological traits and capacities are freighted are in fact historically varied, constructed and contingent. While on the other hand, futurologists seem to dismiss the extent to which salient continuities in human life -- and especially a shared vulnerability to suffering, correction, injury, abuse, neglect, disease, mortality -- have provided a context within which humans have testified together to our hopes and our histories, a context out of which humans have elaborated our still fledgling morals, ethics, politics, aesthetics. If our technique ever truly were to confound long definitive human limits, such as they are, this would hardly be experienced as an ecstatic overcoming of all limits but as a confrontation with new, and utterly bedeviling, limits to our sense of sharable experience and shared significance.

2 comments:

> It is a techno-transcendental commonplace to pretend that medicine> is confounding long definitive biological limitations in human health,> capacity, lifespan, and so on. These claims are usually just completely> false, but they are always overblown. . .>> I see no reason to expect any radical enhancement of definitive human> capacities or any increase of lifespan beyond the upper bound some lucky> humans have always enjoyed in recorded history. . .>> [A]part from. . . well warranted skepticism about imminent techno-transcendental> expectations -- whether originating in ill-informed credulity, promotional fraud,> pseudo-science, or wish-fulfillment fantasizing -- . . . I find. . .> such projected outcomes profoundly wrongheaded in principle even if they> were not also wildly implausible or premature. . .

From today's New York Times (WeekendArts II), "A Prescription for Life'sFinal Stretch", a book review by Janet Maslin of _Being Mortal: Medicineand What Matters in the End_ by Atul Gawande:------------------"I never expected that among the most meaningful experiences I'd have asa doctor -- and, really, as a human being -- would come from helpingothers deal with what medicine cannot do as well as what it can," [Gawande]writes. . .

He begins with an anecdote that illustrates how wrong doctors can be ifthey let their hubris and fear of straight talk meld with a patient'sblind determination to fight on, no matter what. "Don't you give up onme," demands a man with cancer, though the surgery he wants cannotpossibly cure him. "He was pursuing little more than a fantasy at therisk of a prolonged and terrible death -- which was precisely what he got". . .

[A] description of how the body decays with age is nothing if not sobering.It's one thing to know that arteries harden; it's another to. . . [encounter]aortas so calcified that they crunch. And so it goes. . . from the newsthat an elderly person's shrinking brain can actually be knocked aroundinside his or her skull to the way a tooth can determine a person's age. . .Eat and exercise however you want, tell everyone how old your grandparentslived to be: . . . none of these factors do much to slow the march of time.

So a lot of the book is devoted to subjects generally unmentionable, likegeriatrics. "When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless,the geriatrician's uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not,". . .And the number of doctors willing to become geriatricians is shrinking,partly because the field is not as lucrative as, say, plastic surgery,and partly because it provides so little instant satisfaction. . .

"Mainstream doctors are turned off by geriatrics, and that's because they donot have the faculties to cope with the Old Crock," say Dr. Felix Silverstone,a specialist in the field. . . This hypothetical Old Crock is deaf andforgetful, can't see, has trouble understanding what the doctor says, andhas no one chief complaint: he has 15 of them. He has high blood pressure,diabetes and arthritis. "There's nothing glamorous about taking care ofany of those things." . . .====

Also from today's New York Times (WeekendArts I), "Having It All, Exceptfor Humanity", a theater review by Laura Collins-Hughes:------------------He who dies with the most toys wins, or so they say. But what's thepoint of having all those playthings if death is going to rip youfrom them anyway?

In Thomas Gibbons's futuristic two-hander "Uncanny Valley,". . .a very wealthy man named Julian hasn't quite found immortality, buthe has bought a means to forestall his demise for at least acouple of centuries.

With pancreatic cancer about the kill him, Julian plans to downloadthe contents of his mind into an artificial human that carries hisDNA and looks just as he did at 34, more than half a lifetime ago.The machine will assume his identity and his existence.

"I haven't had enough," Julian tells Claire, a neuroscientist whohas spent her career working on artificial consciousness. "Thisworld, this life! I can't even imagine having my fill." . . .

The notion of human consciousness transplanted into machines is inthe air right now. In Brooklyn, a different play called"The Uncanny Valley" [notice the definite article in the title ;-> ]features two actors and a RoboThespian, which is exactly what itsounds like. In Los Angeles, holograms substitute for dead lovedones in Jordan Harrison's "Marjorie Prime."

Mr. Gibbons's "Uncanny Valley" is set perhaps 40-some years in thefuture but deliberately, somewhat jarringly, designed to look likenow. It's a techno take on the Pinocchio story: we watch Julianbecome an almost-real man, with Claire as one of a team of Geppettos.At 70, worried about her ailing, older husband, she's familiarwith the ravages of mortality that the wealthy can now escape. . .====